GHOST SHIP

by Diane Carey

  Data found his way through the barely lit starship with an android’s faultless sense of direction. Ordinarily he’d have thought nothing of that ability, but today it had a stubborn presence in his mind. He was aware of himself today, where usually he was not, at least not when he was alone. But today each pink wedge of utility light along the floor as he passed it was a tiny reminder of his doubts. Each doubt needled his thoughts and made the process inaccurate, irritating. He wondered what thinking was like for humans. To think one thought at a time, some without figures, without context . . . it seemed almost dysfunctional. But humans often perceived things that he missed entirely until they were pointed out to him.

  I seem to be on a cross pattern away from humanity rather than toward it. What they see as simple seems difficult and incongruous to me. What I can compute and perceive without effort, they consider arduous. As time goes by I catalog more and more information, yet I move further and further from humanness because of it. The more time I spend among them, the more complicated they appear to me. Perhaps now these conditions will change. Perhaps this is what they mean by destiny.

  He felt his body come to a halt and readjusted his pilot mode, letting himself slide instantly out of autolocate, and indeed found himself right where he wanted to be. The hangar deck. He stood before the door, staring through the dimness at the lettering.

  SHUTTLECRAFT HANGAR DECK

  AUTHORIZED ENTRY ONLY

  A.C.E. CLEARANCE REQUIRED

  INQUIRE DECK 14

  OR CONTACT SECOND OFFICER

  He lost track of those few seconds during which he studied those letters and their significance. All his internal alarms were ringing, telling him to track down the assistant chief engineer, but there was no time. And that would give him away. Of course, being the second officer got him off the hook fairly well too, even if his internal alarms couldn’t be programmed to know that. Information like that was rational, a matter of thought. The formalized ranking of human beings, of life-forms of any kind, was difficult for machine thinking to absorb, and had to be handled by what Geordi liked to call Data’s subdominant hemisphere—the part of his brain that was organic, the part of his personality that let him be subjective. The part of him that Geordi insisted was no machine.

  Data looked down at his left hand. He opened the fist and saw the glint of gold and brush-buffed platinum in the stylized A-shape that he himself had earned the privilege of wearing. Yet this was not his. His own was still riding safely on his chest, proclaiming the honor of his past and the degree to which humanity had opened its arms to him. He could never look at his Starfleet insignia and think of humanity as inferior to any other species; few species would accept such as him. He had known the shunning glances of prejudice before. Geordi would chide him for not realizing that significance until now, that prejudice was in itself a kind of privilege life-forms kept among themselves.

  The gold turned rosy-pink under the utility lights above the door. He felt a strange, unexpected pang in his chest as his synthetic heart pounded in reaction to the high-gear racing of his nervous system.

  This insignia, this one in his palm—this was Geordi’s.

  Forgive me. I know I have never done anything resembling this to you before. I would have warned you, had I expected to behave this way. . . .

  Illogical. Geordi wasn’t here. Geordi was locked in the antimatter reserve center.

  Data clutched his left hand tightly around the insignia. Also illogical. He should put it down, leave it behind. There was no purpose to carrying it. But rather than leaving the insignia behind, he dismissed the thought and kept his fist tight. With the other hand he quickly tapped in his authorized-entry code and the thick tunnel-shaped doors parted for him.

  The hangar deck stored a few regulation shuttlecraft and several smaller, faster ships of various styles, all hidden neatly away in their stalls, ready to be elevated to the hangar bay, one deck up, when they were called for.

  Very human impatience gnawed at him. He knew very well what impatience was. But there was no alternative to the time he must spend here before he could embark on his mission.

  His hand twitched. Fail-safe programming sent quavers through his biomechanical nervous system, telling him that what he was doing he must not do.

  As easily as ignoring a nagging ache, he rerouted his awareness away from the internal warnings and looked around for the mechanical stock he would need—yes, there it was. He had been concerned that in the midst of a crisis, supply engineering hadn’t managed to deliver these small stock crates in time, but here they sat, stacked neatly before him. He gazed at them in the same manner as he had gazed at the letters on the door. On top of the stack was an authorization chip that simply said: Request of Lt. Commander Data. Esn. F. Palmer—okay.

  Time was limited. Yet he was hesitating. Never before had he found himself literally at odds with himself, literally battling his own body to make it do what his programming—his . . . conscience—had always considered wrong. Deception. Disobedience. It was not in his progr—in his nature.

  His left hand twitched and opened. Geordi’s insignia clattered to the deck with a metallic ting. Data looked down at it.

  Impassively he stooped and picked it up. If he took it with him, the starship’s mainframe would pick up on it and use it as a locator beacon, and would tell the bridge that Geordi was with him. Such a consequence . . . he would leave the insignia behind.

  He would leave it.

  He paced toward the exit and went to the nearest computer panel, still looking at the insignia in his hand.

  “I will leave it,” he insisted. His voice in the empty hangar deck was a loud sound. Why did this insignia whisper to him?

  He put it down quickly. So quickly that it spun on its pin and ended up sideways. He paused.

  Almost as quickly, he pulled off his own insignia. It too was gold, platinum—identical to the other. Except that this was his, what he had earned, and that was Geordi’s. Each was encoded with the biopulse of the owner, including identity, and microsensors, and miniature communicator—Starfleet jargon called these insignia the “minimiracles” of recent science.

  But today it was the shape and not the science that intrigued Data. Today his attention was held by the modern-day heraldry of the Starfleet emblem and what it meant to such as him.

  His powerful heart pumped harder, a heavy muscular action, like the great machine that it was. He heard it thud clearly through his body, and felt the strain upon his systems as each struggled to push its own interests through his biomechanical nervous system, unsure which of the impulses to follow.

  With a gesture of finality, he placed his own insignia on the panel beside Geordi’s and turned away, leaving them there together.

  When he knelt beside the crates the engineers had left here on his order, his body began to settle down as it recognized a task at hand. As the pumping of his heart subsided to its usual cadence, Data began opening the crates of specialized parts and mnemonic encoders and set about constructing a makeshift cloaking device small enough for a shuttlecraft.

  “Now wait a minute!” Riker slid off the desk and fanned his hands before Troi. “We can’t just interfere!”

  “We must,” Troi said, loudly this time. She felt the color rise in her cheeks and anger take over her heart. How dare he stand in her way!

  “Now look,” Picard angrily reminded, “I called this meeting for a clear reason and it’s getting muddled. If I’m going to be forced into making a decision, I intend to have all the precedents behind me. Let’s streamline this, and that’s an order.”

  Before Riker had the chance to respond, Troi leaned toward Picard, the first time she had changed position since all this started. “Captain, humans are interventionists by nature. Since ancient times, and even before that, we’ve intervened in the course of evolution by selective marriage, all the way back to tribal beginnings when the chief got his choice of the fairest, youngest, strongest maidens, and they had childr
en who grew up to be the decision makers for the whole tribe. It is our heritage!”

  “That’s nonsense,” Riker accused.

  “Not necessarily.” Crusher pressed on. Her tone had a defensive sting and she turned a cold shoulder to him and spoke to the captain instead. “When we cured pneumonia and TB, we altered evolution forever. Countless millions who were weak and meant to die simply didn’t anymore. When glasses were invented, all the millions of nearsighted people who would’ve been functionally blind in an earlier century suddenly were completely normal. They not only lived, but prospered, mated, had more nearsighted children. Mankind’s been circumventing natural selection for so long that it’s become immoral not to. There’s your precedent, Captain. I don’t believe the question is whether or not to interfere.”

  “What about science?” Riker interrupted, circling the desk to the captain’s side. “Could technology eventually put these captive entities into bodies? Like Data’s?”

  Picard glared at him for a moment, then pivoted to Crusher. “Doctor, what about that?”

  She shifted from one elbow to the other and dubiously said, “I’ll just wave my magic wand. . . . In my opinion, it might be too late for them. If they’ve been in a virtual fugue state since 1995 and most even before that, they may have lost their ability to be embodied in humanoid form.”

  “You mean like a blind man suddenly getting complete sight?” Picard suggested. “Something like that?”

  “I mean exactly that. There are plenty of circumstances that allow current medicine to replace or restore sight, but unless the patient is very young, there are usually grave complications. If I suddenly restored Geordi’s sight with some kind of transplant or something, he’d have to completely retrain his senses. His whole body, his whole brain. His sense of visual depth would be all askew, for one. He’d be grabbing for things that were ten feet away, because he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. He probably couldn’t walk with his eyes open either. Not without extensive therapy. His equilibrium would be completely thrown off. His balance would suddenly be affected by something that had never affected it before. There’ve been too many disastrous cases of restored sight. Some patients ultimately opted to have blindness reinflicted rather than continue with sight.”

  “My God . . . seriously?”

  “Far too many for me to recommend trying to hook up these whatever-they-ares to android bodies.” She lowered her voice and let empathy slip into her professional assessment. “It’d be a worse hell than they’re already going through. And, Captain, I think the only rational, moral decision,” she added, “is the one they’ve selected for themselves.”

  “We’re not that sure of what they want,” Riker insisted.

  Troi twisted in her chair, her face a sculpture of pure melancholy and disappointment. Her face ached with the misery she felt inside and the insult she heard from without.

  “Well, you’re not,” Riker said to her. “You’re not, are you?”

  “Bill . . . ” she choked.

  He circled the desk and confronted her. “You yourself have admitted that these people could be insane and incapable—”

  “Some of them, but—”

  Dr. Crusher put her slim hand on his arm and actually pushed him back from where she and Troi were sitting side by side. “This life-sucking machine is violating the rights and needs of its captives.”

  Riker whirled and glared down at her. “Which rights?”

  “The right to normal life as they see it and the dignity of self-decision. It’s robbing them of a quality of life to such a degree that all they see left for themselves is death.”

  “So we provide it, all on Deanna’s say-so?”

  Troi lowered her eyelids now, and tears broke from them. “Oh, Bill,” she whispered.

  But he pressed on. “How do we know their decision is rational? It may be one of plain despair or temporary depression.”

  Crusher didn’t back away from his challenge, but was ready with her own. “You call three hundred years temporary?”

  “On that thing’s time scale? It might be. And you don’t know and I don’t know otherwise. That thing could be a galactic utopia, for all we know. It could provide endless time to think about things and intermingle and share memories—who knows what else? Maybe Deanna’s only picking up the wishes of a handful of new arrivals who don’t know what they’ve got.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Troi said, her lips tight.

  “All right—all right, say I don’t either. Say you’ve convinced me. What happens once we do this? Once we’ve tasted this? If we open this door a crack, it may not close. Candles can start holocausts, Captain.”

  Crusher suddenly got to her feet and stepped toward him, using her height and her own grace to prove that he wasn’t the only imposing one in the room. “We can keep control of ourselves, Mr. Riker. Medical science has had to live with self-control on a personal basis for centuries. Captain, I know you don’t like to use the weapons, but that thing is a tyrant!”

  Riker bent over the desk, his palms flat on its black top. “If we bend our rules,” he insisted, “or even amend them, even at the request of the terminally ill, then we risk all of us. When we turn down the death requests of individuals, we protect us all.” He looked at the captain and said, “We’re playing ethical roulette, sir, and I’m not comfortable with it.”

  Troi didn’t look at him, but there was a poignant lack of charity in her tone. “It’s not your comfort we’re talking about.”

  His eyes flashed. “No,” he stabbed back, “but we’re risking the ethical security of every sentient life we contact from now on. How long before this gets out of hand? We’re at risk as a society if it does.”

  The captain frowned at him. “I’m not willing to take on the moral burden of all humanity, Number One,” he said, “but I intend to take a stand here and now. I appreciate your playing devil’s advocate, but—”

  “I’m not,” Riker told him. “I don’t think it’s our place to do this. And I don’t think it’s fair of those beings to ask this of us. We have the right not to become murderers.”

  “Captain,” Crusher interjected, “we’re past the point of no return. Our killing them may be hard on us, but their living is harder on them.”

  “That’s your opinion, doctor,” Riker clarified.

  “Yes,” she said. “The captain asked for my opinion. If you’re captain someday, you don’t have to ask me.”

  Bitterness swirled between them, and for several seconds, she let it have its way. Once the silence became oppressive, she inhaled deeply and addressed the captain with her final word. “Sir, in my judgment as chief surgeon of the Enterprise,” she said, “we have what will go down in my report as acceptable prior consent.”

  The captain heard the ball drop cleanly into his court. Was his responsibility to the beings inside the entity, or to the entity, or to the ship, or to those life-forms whose essences would be absorbed by that thing in the future if he failed to act now?

  “It’s Federation mandate to avoid policing the galaxy, Captain.” Riker’s face reflected clearly in the viewport.

  Picard nodded tightly. “Yes, we can’t forget that. Federation policy will have to be my guide on this. The dirty reality is that we may not even be able to save ourselves. The better part of valor may be to get away and let the Federation decide how to deal with this thing.”

  Troi rocketed from her chair. “You don’t understand! These people can’t even communicate with each other! There are millions of them, all alone. Alone! It’s not like a crippled body. Even then there can be sight, sound, interaction—these people have nothing!”

  The captain started toward her. “Counselor—”

  She backed away. “You don’t know what it’s like! You can’t know. You can talk and discuss and argue, but you don’t know. Captain, if that entity comes after us and there is no way to stop it from absorbing us, I promise you I will not go on like that! I will not! I’ll ki
ll myself first.”

  “Deanna,” Crusher began, reaching for her.

  But every one of them was affected by the utter conviction in her voice, her face, by the irrational promise from a person they knew to be supremely rational.

  Riker felt especially responsible, and he stood a few paces away, unable to make himself go to her.

  Dr. Crusher put an arm around Troi and steered her toward the door. “Come with me. I’ll give you something to calm you down.”

  Troi started to go, but now she pushed away violently. “No! I don’t dare let you sedate me! I can barely keep control now. Doesn’t anyone understand?”

  “Yes, yes,” Crusher told her. “You know I do. Let’s just go out to the bridge.” She steered the other woman toward the door, and cast a scolding look back at Riker and Picard. “We’ll just be a few minutes.” Her words said one thing; her look said another.

  Picard watched them leave without uttering a sound. When he and Riker were finally alone, he turned to the viewport and stared out into open space.

  Before him was the panorama of distant stars and solar systems, the gas giant that had recently been their biggest problem and suddenly looked puny and insignificant as it whirled in bright green innocence at the very edge of his view. Two deep lines bracketed his mouth. He was a man with too many choices.

  “That infernal thing is hiding out there, waiting for us to make a mistake,” he said. His voice dropped to a near whisper. “How many more of this kind of thing are out there, Riker? How many more decisions like this? What do we do when we have no doubt about a person’s—a community’s—rational, reasonable desire to die?”

  Standing beside him, Riker could offer no real solution—but he had his own personal answer. One as first officer—not captain—he could afford.

  Without moving, he quietly asked, “Do we have that, sir?”

  Picard continued to stare out the viewport, but a furrow appeared in his brow and his eyes drew tight. “I have to know, as closely as I can know, if this thing is a floating utopia,” he mused, “or an interstellar hell.”